Five questions with Denny Middle School’s City Year mentors

James Dixon and Becka Gross are two of the red-vested City Year mentors who work at Denny International Middle School in West Seattle. Here, the two AmeriCorps members, featured in Thursday’s story about the importance of attendance, answer questions from reporter Claudia Rowe about their work at Denny and their own middle-school experiences.

—

City Year mentor James Dixon, right, helps eighth-grader Jonathan Barajas with a math equation during a recent class at Denny Middle School. Photo by Mike Siegel / The Seattle Times

Name: James DixonAge: 23Hometown: Seattle

Q: You attended middle school at Denny. What was that like?

Dixon: My middle school experience was a difficult one. I came to Denny not knowing anyone, and the school was vastly different than it is now. There were fights very often, and little to no structure in the school.

Q: What surprises you about working with middle schoolers?

Dixon: I think one thing that surprises me the most is their work ethic. I remember I was not a very motivated student in eighth grade. I often did not pay attention in class. These students do not give up. Even if they do not understand, they stay after school and come in at lunch to succeed.

Q: Do you remember attendance being a problem among your peers when you were in middle school? What do you think keeps students away at this age?

Dixon: During my seventh-grade year, I had horrible attendance. I think what kept me away was the atmosphere. The teachers did not seem to motivated to teach, and I felt like they gave up on us students. I think that also affected attendance among other students.

Q: What do you bring to the table that’s different from a teacher or parent?

Dixon: I think my age allows me to have different relationship with the students. I am able to have a peer-mentor relationship with the students, and I feel like they are more open to talk to me because I do not seem like a authority figure.

Q: As a mentor, how can you tell when you’ve really gotten through to a kid?

Dixon: I have one student who asked me, “What are you doing after City Year?” I said, “I don’t know yet. Maybe teach.” He said: “Yeah, you should teach so when I go to Chief Sealth (High School) next year you can be my ninth-grade math teacher.”

—

Becka Gross speaks with student Muna Sheikh while monitoring the hallways during a recent lunch period at Denny International Middle School. Photo by Mike Siegel / The Seattle Times.

Name: Becka GrossAge: 23Hometown: Bay Area, Calif.

Q:What was your own middle-school experience like? What challenges did you face, and what helped you move past them?

Gross: Middle school was definitely a difficult and confusing time in my life, which is why I was interested in working with this age group.

I had strict (but sometimes clueless) parents and was eager for autonomy. I was grappling with questions around both gender and sexual identity, struggling with the too-cool-for-school complex, and hanging out with kids who liked fighting. I was deciding who I wanted to be and who I wanted my friends to be. Unfortunately, I spent a lot of time grounded or in the principal’s office.

Q: Do you remember attendance being a problem among your peers when you were in middle school? What do you think keep students away at this age?

Gross: In retrospect, attendance was a problem among me and my peers in middle school. I was not very motivated to get myself to class. I definitely remember missing far too much school, and having lots of arguments at home resulting from me trying to skip school. In one particular instance I remember begging my mom to let me stay home when I had a giant pimple on my face because I was terrified of how my peers would react.

Middle school can be a really daunting place. Preteens and young teens are eager for a sense of belonging, and unfortunately that often comes down to hurting each other based on differences.

Q: What do you like best about helping kids?

Gross: Every day is different with them, and it’s exciting to work in such unpredictability and get to handle a variety of issues. The students I have worked with are in a process of self-discovery and often have much more creativity in thinking about the world than many adults in my life. Working with kids inspires me and helps me become a more compassionate, patient and understanding person.

City Year mentors at Denny Middle School in West Seattle cheer their students on as they arrive at school first thing in the morning. Photo by Mike Siegel / The Seattle Times

Q: As a mentor, what do you bring to the table that’s different from a teacher or parent?

Gross: I’m able to talk to students concerning issues that they might not always be ready or able to talk to their parents or teachers about. Corps members get to spend time with students throughout the school day and see them in a context that their parents cannot and their teachers less often do. The emotional support I’ve been able to give students throughout the school day as a corps member has lightened their load and helped many of them concentrate better inside the classroom.

Q: What surprises you about working with middle schoolers?

Gross: How rapidly they can change and how resilient they are. There are times I’ve had to be really stern and get very real with a student, going home thinking they will never want to speak to me again. In my experience they usually are less likely to hold grudges than I expect and are appreciative of people who treat them with respect and push them to realize their potential.

Stories in the series

When tackling the topic of student discipline, some of the country’s toughest schools have done a turnaround. Instead of focusing on rules broken, they now ask kids to confront themselves. The result? Fewer suspensions and new perspective on the point of school itself. Read the story →

It stands to reason: Kick troubled students out of school and they often come back even worse. The Kent School District is trying to tackle this national problem by overhauling the way it handles discipline. But its answers spark even more questions. Read the story →

In an idea borrowed from college athletics, the University of Washington boosts promising engineering students — many of them women and minorities — with an extra year of academic work. Read the story →

Boosting the quality of preschool in Seattle could help children, and the city as a whole. A number of studies, including one from the ’60s, establish that potential. But there is no guarantee of success. Read the story →

Universal, free preschool in Tulsa, Okla., has produced results attracting national attention, and could be a blueprint for Seattle. But after 16 years the long-term outcomes raise almost as many questions as they answer. Read the story →

Communication failures both within Seattle Public Schools and with parents of children with disabilities continue to undermine the district’s efforts to fix longstanding problems in special education. Read the story →

A new focus on individualized advice and counseling, boosted by software tools, is helping hundreds more students earn degrees and certificates each year at Walla Walla Community College. Read the story →

The path to college often leaves disadvantaged students behind. Two unusual nonprofits, one based in Seattle, have helped vault thousands of low-income students onto university campuses. Read the story →

In an attempt to add depth to the curriculum in America's most popular advanced high-school courses, some local teachers threw out most of their lectures and replaced them with a series of projects. Results so far are encouraging. Read the story →

Western Washington University college students are working as mentors, tutors and role models for thousands of K-12 students in and around Bellingham. The goal: convince them that college should be part of their educational trajectory. Read the story →

Kent educators combed through transcripts and discovered 2,600 young people in their district without any kind of diploma or credential. Enter iGrad, a program linking dropouts with college, that has been flooded with kids who want a second chance. Read the story →

A community group in northwest Chicago has turned hundreds of hesitant parents into capable classroom helpers, role models and leaders by tapping into strengths many don't realize they have. Read the story →

Missing just a few days of class in sixth grade can predict whether you'll graduate from high school. That research powers a national anti-dropout effort that's making a difference at Seattle's Aki Kurose and Denny International middle schools. Read the story →

For years, students at White Center Heights Elementary logged some of the lowest test scores in King County. Then teachers tried something new, and the numbers soared by double-digits after just one year. So what happened, and could it be replicated elsewhere? Read the story →

About the authors

John Higgins is one of Education Lab's reporters. He was a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) from 2012 to 2013.

Katherine Long has been a reporter for The Seattle Times since 1990, focusing for the past three years on higher ed, with stories that have ranged from the complexities of prepaid tuition programs to nontraditional ways to earn a degree.

Claudia Rowe joined The Seattle Times’ reporting staff in 2013. She has written about education for The New York Times and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, among other publications.

Leah Todd is an education reporter at The Times. She previously covered education for the Casper Star-Tribune in Wyoming.

Mike Siegel has been a news photographer at the Seattle Times since 1987. His photography was used in a series titled "Methadone and the Politics of Pain," which won a Pulitzer Prize in 2012 for investigative reporting.

Linda Shaw is The Times’ education editor. Previously, she covered public education as a reporter at The Seattle Times for more than two decades. Her coverage has won numerous national and local awards and honors.

Caitlin Moran is community engagement editor for Education Lab. She came to The Times from Patch, where she spent three years managing hyperlocal news websites on the Eastside.

About Solutions Journalism Network

The Education Lab project is being done with the support of the Solutions Journalism Network. SJN is a non-profit organization created to legitimize and spread the practice of solutions journalism: rigorous and compelling reporting about responses to social problems.